The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated as soon as possible.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Welcome back to The Real News Network. I’m Maximillian Alvarez. As a writer, podcaster and a columnist for us here at The Real News, Adam Johnson has been one of the fiercest, sharpest and most consistent critics of legacy in Western media’s roles in laundering, obscuring, justifying and manufacturing consent for crimes against humanity committed in the Gaza genocide by Israel with the full support of the United States. Crimes committed in our name and with our tax dollars and the media cannot be let off the hook for its despicable role in all of this. As Adam writes in his new book, How to Sell a Genocide, the media’s complicity in the destruction of Gaza, “It took deliberate choices by deliberate moral actors, editors, reporters, bookers, producers, and TV personalities who decided early on in the so- called Israel-Hamas war that defending the powerful and spinning a fictional narrative to soothe Western liberal audiences was more important than speaking plain truths than defending a dispossessed people from a holy asymmetric campaign carried out by Israel with the full backing of the US to destroy in whole or in part the Palestinians of Gaza.” Listen, critique is not enough anymore.

If we are going to ensure that these horrific crimes don’t continue, then we need accountability for the political actors and the media organizations that made it happen or helped. We need a reckoning, but we’re not going to get one if we don’t fight for it. And Adam’s new book, in my opinion, gives us the data and the receipts and the analysis that we need to fight better and to actually win. I cannot recommend it enough and I am so proud to call Adam a friend and a colleague. He is a vital member of the Real News team and he has done a vital service to all of us in writing this book. So go check it out yourself and let us know what you think and let me know what you think about this conversation that I had with Adam Johnson about his new book at a live event at Red Emma’s Cooperative Bookstore and Coffeehouse here in Baltimore on May 23rd.

Well, again, welcome, welcome everyone. Thank you so much to Red Emmas for hosting this important discussion tonight about Brother Adam Johnson’s vital new book, How to Sell a Genocide, The Media’s Complicity and the Destruction of Gaza Out Now with Pluto Press. It is an invaluable read and I cannot stress enough the duty that we have to know what’s in this book. I don’t say that lightly, and I don’t say it to just chuck my buddy up. Adam, I’ve gotten the pleasure and honor of growing up with you over the past 10 or so years in the media ecosystem, the left media ecosystem, and then get to know you, get to be friends with you, get to work together. I wanted to say first that I know we joke a lot that what are we doing? We’re just podcasters. We’re not that out there doing the real work, but I wanted to thank you for doing the work that you do at Citations Needed and Everywhere Else.

Thank you for writing this book because even if you on your side through the microphone don’t see it or you on your phone tweeting at people and Dunking on people don’t see it, so often you and Nima, especially through citations needed, but now with this all your writing, you give us so many of us the language that we’re looking for to articulate what we’re feeling and sensing, but don’t have the time to process and don’t have the ability to find those words. And in this book, you have given us a tremendous amount of necessary ammunition to focus what we have known and sensed but not been able to fully articulate. And so I wanted to first acknowledge that. Second, I wanted to acknowledge here at the top that of course both of us as journalists here in the United States, a media critic journalist, however Adam wants to identify himself, we of course must have a moment of silence to honor those of our journalists and media making colleagues who have been slaughtered in this genocide and who continue to be slaughtered in Gaza, in Lebanon, in Iran.

So can you please join me in just a quick moment of silence to honor our fallen comrades and to thank them for their invaluable sacrifice.

Okay. Thank you all so much. All right, brother out. Like I said, your podcast and my podcast started around the same time. We got into this game around 10 or so years ago and we’ve gotten to working with each other. We publish your invaluable column at the real news now and for a few years now and you guys should absolutely read it. So I wanted to start there and ask if you could talk about how you got into media criticism and why. But then let’s talk about that growth process and let’s talk about what it was like to be a media critic as a genocide was unfolding in Gaza and what about all of that propelled you to move beyond podcasting and article writing into writing this book?

Adam Johnson:

Well, thank you for that introduction and thank you for having me here. Right Emma’s is of course a write a passage. You’re not really a leftling writer if you don’t come here. So I’m glad to be here. It’s huge, but it’s a very well organized operation, so thank you. Yeah, so I don’t talk about myself a lot, mostly because I don’t know, I feel like it’s genuinely quite boring, but I’ve always been interested in language and how language can shape our reality and my entry point into the left such as it was, the immortal science, whatever you wish to call it, I was late to the game. I mean, I was basically 29, 30 years old when I started exploring those ideas and media was a way I was like the entry point into that. And I’ve always thought media criticism is an entry point into asking bigger questions.

It’s a gateway drug. The podcast is meant to be a gateway drug. I’m like in the school yard pedaling left wing ideology like, “Come here kid, listen to citations needed.” It’s sort of vaguely liberal coded, but it’s not. So my goal is to be on one of those Glen Beck chalkboards. And so that’s how I, as an entry point into asking bigger questions because I think once one erodes the artifice of media, which we kind of imperfectly refer to as small L liberal media or center left media or mainstream media, I think it’s a gateway to ask bigger questions because once the artifice begins to crumble, I think you sort of ask yourself, well, okay, if this kind of officialdom, if the thing that is these very important people behind desks and these kind of prestigious institutions are basically full of shit, then you have to ask yourself, what do we build as an alternative to that?

And then in some senses, the whole institute, because this book is fundamentally a book about the hypocrisy and the enforcement status of so- called liberal institutions and liberalism. And that’s why chapter seven is basically about that and how Gaza and the liberal response to Gaza and the liberal promotion of genocide, I should say elite liberal promotion of genocide was fundamentally a liberal project for that first year we were documenting. Obviously they were partnered and helped by the right and Republicans in Fox News, but fundamentally would not have been possible without liberal buy-in. And so obviously it very much falls into the wheelhouse of the Citations Deeded Podcast, which obviously critiques the ways in which liberals promote reactionary ideas and indeed work to launder reactionary ideas and make them seem palatable. And so it was a natural fit. And then obviously I had been writing ferociously from the beginning of it because as anyone who knows anything about Gaza knew precisely what was going to happen, it was very clear that on October 8th, when Tony Blinken tweeted out a call for a ceasefire and then subsequently deleted it a couple hours later that this was going to be at best killing an arbitrarily high number of Palestinians in the figures and at worst a genocide.

And of course it largely was a genocide and of course they ended up killing almost certainly over six figures. And so from the beginning, you and I were writing about it and you were letting me use obviously your platform to write about it and write media criticism about it. Much of the book is, not much, but some percentage of the book is readapting writing I did for y’all. So thank you for that because there was not a ton of outlets who were willing to do that, especially in a kind of existential way. And then once we started going, it was like, well, we need to quantifiably show this. So it’s a very data driven book, which is something I hadn’t previously had the time to do and that was central to how we did the book because I didn’t want to just assert it or cherry pick headlines.

I wanted to quantitatively show and establish bias and then from there in double standards and from there we can ask bigger questions once one accepts the premise of that, what is the implications of that? Because it’s a book much like citations needed. It’s a book for liberals. It’s not a book for the left who obviously by definition agrees with me, although I want them to be able to use the data and research and arguments in their daily lives. But it’s a book that is supposed to take someone who’s vaguely liberal or vaguely liberal left or progressive and senses something was wrong and then slowly and meticulously walk them to the water that there’s a larger critique of Zionism and US imperialism and that the media operates as an organ of those institutions not as any kind of neutral or objective, certainly not a counter or an adversary to those institutions.

And so again, I’m pedaling the drugs trying to get people addicted. First one’s always free and that’s kind of the way I approached the book. Now obviously the title’s provocative, but the word genocide I believe is more or less mainstream now. And you can’t get around that word because to do so is genocide denial. It’s something like I think 60 or 70% of Democrats, depending on the poll, believe it’s a genocide. So that itself is no longer even that provocative. What I believe is maybe more novel and useful to liberals in liberal left adjacent types is the concept that they were sold to genocide, that it wasn’t this bumbling accident that kind of happened or this one-off dictator who forced people to do it, but actually had ideological and narrative antecedents that were being pushed by so- called liberal media. So by the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC were the primary targets of my inquiry and criticism.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and that tees up kind of like my next question because that was awesome, it was thoughtful. I really appreciated that answer, but I also know the entire time you were screaming and ripping your hair out and like these fucking people look at the lies that I know because Adam would be pitching me. He’s like, “Hey, I got to write about this. ” I was like, “All right, go for it. ” And I knew so much was going through your mind and so much like the rest of us. We were seeing these sort of double standards. We were sort of seeing the kind of dual realities on the TV and on our phones, but again, it needed to go beyond just that sort of sense and needing to quantify and needing to name. And so I wanted to sort of unleash the attack dog, Adam Johnson we all know and love a second.

Let’s name some names here. Who are the worst offenders and why?

Adam Johnson:

Yeah. And I want to preface this by saying that that is the next stage of this project where I’m doing basically taking the 10 worst and we’re naming names and going to try to reach out to them and do more aggressive targeted criticism with like maybe in parallel campaignse because I do think when you criticize the media or the New York Times, it can be a little bit abstract, that which is owned by everyone is cared for by no one to paraphrase libertarians, but I think in some senses you can be too abstract. So the book does name names in retrospect as I’m rereading it, I felt like I probably should have made that more central, a little bit more ad hominem, a little more personal. And that’s kind of the next stage because we need to have accountability. And in parallel, I know others who I’ve spoken to are working on a project to hold Democrats accountable because now as you know, I’m a little bit off topic here, but indulge me.

You have Tony Blinken who covered up war crimes at the State Department. He’s now at Center for American Progress just down the road in DC. Obviously John Finer is at Center for American Progress, which if anyone knows what that is, it’s a ostensibly progressive think tank that’s basically the government in waiting for the next Democratic administration. John Feiner and Jake Sullivan, who also covered up war crimes and sold weapons to a country that knew was committing genocide, have a cheeky little foreign policy podcast on Fox. So what we’re working on with that is what we’re trying to come up with a branding for, but it’s going to be the Genocide 10 or the Genocide 20 where you’re basically pressuring organizations to remove these people from polite society, which of course is a bar that’s below the mantle of the earth. I mean, it’s the lowest bar possible, but right now everyone’s just vibing through it.

Progressives and liberals in Congress are doing events now with Jake Sullivan and Tony Blinken. So really it’s a project fundamentally about accountability. And the reason why that is, and again, it’s going to be an upward battle, but I do think that you can build pressure, especially as every four years when Democrats have to act like they care what progressives or liberals think or even liberals, to be honest, that there needs to be a sense that these people need to be non-grada at the very least. So obviously you would refer them to the ICC for criminal arrest and prosecution for their role and complicity and genocide along with some of these media organs we can talk about. But at the very least, they need to be removed from polite society. And so fundamentally it just becomes a book about accountability because there’s not much else you can do.

And the conclusion I say I’m like the drummer boy and the drummer boy Christmas song. “What is he doing? Plays the drums. That’s all he can do. All I can do is media criticism. And I think like everyone else, as this was unfolding, you felt completely helpless. But I think the lesson you can take away from this and the lesson that Palestinian organizers and BDS organizers always tell you is that you can always contest in the way you can and the spaces you can. Whether you’re a tech worker, you can go on strike or boycott or try to … There’s always something you can do and it’s like, this is the only thing I’m able to do. I don’t have any other skillset or talent. I just know how to do media criticism. So that’s what I did and I tried to do it to the best of my ability.

That’s a very convoluted way of answering your question, but I think what you’re talking about is, what you allude to is the idea of accountability. So who are the worst? The worst were Jake Tapper and Joe Scarborough are featured heavily in this book as just outright genocidal propagandists, outwardly lying, smearing anyone opposing the war. Obviously New York Times, Patrick Kingsley, others, editors at the New York Times were probably certain writers who laundered Israeli intelligence over and over again, which we can get into. Those were the primary offenders. Actually, one of the things I try to do in the book and all the subsequent interviews I’ve done is I try not to flatten the difference that there are some that are worse than others. The New York Times is meaningfully worse than the Washington Post. Washington Post is not good, but they didn’t engage in what I would consider outright genocide incitement.

The New York Times would constantly intervene right when there was some pressure to push Biden for a ceasefire with the most obvious lies and bullshit. I’ll give you an example if you’ll indulge me.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, I was going to say, keep rolling and let’s talk about some of the worst offenses. If we could give in an ode to citations needed, give me your top three worst tropes or your top three most eye-popping stats from this book.

Adam Johnson:

Maybe let’s start at the beginning then if you’ll indulge me. So very quickly, the idea of a ceasefire needed to be removed from the realm of capital V capital S very seriousness, right? It had to be considered a far left fringe position, despite the fact that every other mowing the lawn episode, which is what Israel calls it when they kill civilians in Gaza as a part of collective punishment, had had a ceasefire. 2012, 2014, 2018, 2021, obviously 2009 cast led. But very early on when again, Blinken sends out the tweet and subsequently deletes it, it’s very clear a decision is made that they’re going for it all. They’re going for full-blown ethnic cleansing genocidal acts and at worst from their perspective, killing an arbitrarily high number of Palestinians as medieval reconpense and collective punishment to humiliate them so they will self-deport or leave because Palestinians are a fundamentally inconvenient people to the national methos and mythology of Zionism and anyone who knew anything about Gaza knew that was going to happen.

So within the first few days, you get this what I call isisification of Hamas in the first chapter, which is Hamas cannot have any secular grievances or political causes. They have to be mindless Jihadist cartoons who are just mindless anti-Semites, which as far as … Biden says they had the ancient hatred of Jews, which again, bad luck that the people who drove them off their land happened to have that as their national religion, out of all the gin joints and all the towns and all the world. But the idea that you would provide context was anathema. And so this was disciplined and enforced in a very documented way. First up was MSNBC. So on the morning of October 7th, Ali Valshi is running the desk at MSNBC and he brings in Iman Moihadine who had lived in Gaza for two years. He was by far the most qualified person to talk about it.

And so live on air as the attack is unfolding and we’re kind of getting information trickling in, they do what all journalists are supposed to do. They begin to provide context. They don’t cheer it on. They’re not for it. They’re not like saying, isn’t Hamas great? They’re saying talking about the Nakba, the dispossession, how 75% of the people in Gaza are refugees who were kicked out of their homes and what is today Israel. They’re talking about protective edge in 2014, putting them on a diet, the siege, the lack of being able to travel, all that. All hell breaks loose.

We reported this from two internal sources at MSNBC, which as I’m sure you would imagine was much easier to get sources in than say the New York Times, because a lot of people were ashamed of their role in this and were happy to talk. And this was later vaguely confirmed by the New York Times as well, but they bring in, they being Comcast, it’s the first and since last time they ever directly intervene in MSNBC’s coverage. They bring in Rashida Jones and Caesar Conde, who are the head of MSNBC and NBC News respectively and they say,” Never do that again. “That was terrorism apology. You’re not allowed to provide context for what happened on October 7th and indeed history has to start on October 7th. Nothing can precede it, right? It’s like the big bang. There’s nothing that precedes it. It’s like asking what’s north of the North Pole.

It’s ontologically impossible. And that was reflected in the coverage. Then on March 9th, there’s a company-wide call at MSNBC according to our two of our sources where they bring in Martin Fletcher, who’s the longtime NBC news correspondent who has since retired and he had family who were injured on October 7th. He himself had served in the IDF and he jumps on a conference call with all of MSNBC and NBC News and gives the playbook. He says,” Palestinians aren’t real. They weren’t a people until 1967. They’re invented by Arab nations. Jews are the real Palestinians. These are direct quotes, more or less. And Israel left greenhouses in Gaza. You’re kind of typical really racist anti-Palestinian vomit. And that becomes the official line in MSNBC. And if they say, if you have any questions, you go to Martin Fletcher because he’s the longtime NBC correspondent. CNN does something quite similar where Mark Thompson issues a memo on October 26th where he affirms an existing policy, which was probably more informal saying, you cannot mention the suffering of Palestinians or these Palestinian death counts without prefacing it with October 7th.

So that way it has to be framed by definition as defensive and you can’t talk about anything that basically comes before it. And so you would have a story, you were allowed to say, “Isn’t it sad this Palestinian died or there was this explosion that killed 15 people, but you always have to say as a military response to October 7th.” And so these policies very initially make it so you cannot provide context. Context is anathema. It is not allowed because it’s viewed as Hamas propaganda or terrorism apologea. And this therefore reduces, and of course you have the parallel atrocity of propaganda with the beheaded babies on October 11th. A story completely invented out of whole cloth that’s spread by everyone from Nick Robertson at CNN to Sarah Sidner who says it live on CNN where she says, “The Prime Minister Netanyahu’s office has confirmed that there were several beheaded babies at the Kabutsum.” Now the Prime Minister can’t confirm his own racist propaganda.

That’s absurd, but that was the editorial standard. You could basically say whatever you wanted about Palestinians. And then once the story was … And then of course Biden says he saw video of it, which he of course did not because it never happened and slowly tweets are deleted, people kind of issue very opaque apologies, but very early on they had to be this cartoon ISIS-like entity because you had to make a ceasefire impossible. And this was affirmed by progressives in Congress who refused to call for a ceasefire for months. Obviously Rokana, Elizabeth Warren, I think most cynically and most, I think high leverage was Bernie Sanders who went on CNN and CBS News in November and December of 2023 respectively and said, “I don’t know how you have a ceasefire with a group like Maas who seeks Israel’s destruction.” Now nevermind, of course, that Israel seeks Palestinians destructions.

Nevermind that a call for a ceasefire is not a moral endorsement of an organization. It’s just a call for a ceasefire. And this was affirmed by CIP, Matt Duss, who was like supposedly the far left progressive poll of so- called progressive foreign policy. He goes on democracy now and says, “Bernie Sanders has a good point. I’m paraphrasing, but something to that effect.” He basically affirms the logic of that. So it’s a far left position, a radical pie in the sky. You get a dozen articles in the Atlantic saying a ceasefire is impossible. Meanwhile, we’re getting 300 day dead, 500 dead a day. They kill almost 6,000 people in the first 11 days. They’re averaging about 550 dead people a day, 30% of whom are children. And you could not talk about a ceasefire mainstream media. There was no mention of it in New York Times.

The New York Times editorial board and Washington Post editorial board supported. Everyone is in this stories about how it’s eight billion, nine elevens or some kind of fatuous nonsense like that. And it’s immediately indexed in this kind of war on terror civilization versus this vague Asiatic ward who again are presented as this cartoon villain with no political grievances. And that right there cements creates the inevitability of genocide because if you have to defeat Hamas, you by definition cannot do that. They are a gorilla force, an indigenous guerrilla force. Unlike ISIS, they’re not who are foreign mercenaries. They are of Gaza. They live in Gaza. They are Palestinians in Gaza and they support hovers between 40 and 55% in Gaza. It’s a litle higher in the West Bank, but they’re Palestinians, like all grill military movements that are national liberation movements, again, whether you like them or not, doesn’t matter.

They’re not going to just surrender. And this is something Tony Blinken himself affirms behind closed doors in January of 2024 when Andrea Mitchell reports that Blinken tells Nanyahu that Hamas cannot be defeated militarily. Now, a reporter worked their salt would say, “Well, wait a second, then why are we arming and funding this extensively military operation?” But this is the kind of Orwellian inverse reality we operated in for several months where everything is a contradiction. And then of course, which we can get into, and I’ll maybe let you interject here so I’m not droning on, but then you get into the ceasefire redefinition in late February, early March of 2024 where ceasefire is polling at about 75% Democrats don’t even bother at that point defending the genocide on first principles or as such. Then they move into the helpless Biden fuming Biden. We’re actually working on a ceasefire.

Okay, what’s your definition of ceasefire? And then you hear their definition and it’s simply reasserting terms of capitulation, reasserting demands of surrender by Hamas, which of course has not been the definition of ceasefire for 5,000 years of human warfare. Ceasefires, both sides ceasefire and you come to a political solution, not I win and you surrender. That’s just you winning. But then that becomes the oralian definition that’s broadly adopted by the media. And this goes on for months and months and months and months and months. It was based on a fundamental contradiction and the only people who ever pointed it out were people like left wing critics on like, “This doesn’t make any sense.” And so that’s all documented in the book. Basically with the argument is that within the first few weeks really, the White House doesn’t even defend it as such. They simply try to move it into the non-sequitur by playing up this idea that Biden is either helpless, which again, the media assisted these laundering operations or that he’s very mad.

He was always sort of vaguely upset all the time. It’s what I call the asymptotic break with Netanyahu. I can read you some examples if you’ll indulge me. I know I’ve been rambling here for a bit, but I do think these are very illustrative.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Bro, people literally came out in the rain to listen to you talk.

Adam Johnson:

There’s talking and then there’s talking. But sorry, I’m going to make sure I get … So this is, I think, critical and this is when you get these, I think, fairly sophisticated liberal interventions of inventing reality, which I think was one of the reasons people felt like they were going insane at the time because it was all premised on a contradiction. So you had this idea of the helpless Biden, which I’ll skip and get to the fuming Biden. So this was a media trope. There’s literally dozens of these articles, but I documented the top 10 and then we did a source analysis. So 94% of the sourcing for these stories are White House aids and very quickly one can realize why they would be painting this narrative because they themselves know it’s indefensible. They themselves want to go in and out of liberal and progressive circles.

So the decision is made to distance the White House in some kind of narrative or abstract sense while painting them as working towards a ceasefire or some peaceful resolution, sufficiently removing them from the genocide that they themselves are arming, supporting and diplomatically providing cover for. So you have November of 2023, it begins in earnest with NBC news. The gap between the Biden administration and the Netanyahu government over Gaza future is widening. Ooh, it’s widening. CNN, December of 2023, unprecedented tensions, unprecedented. Watch out. Between White House and Netanyahu as Biden feels political price for standing with Israel. Axios, our friend Barack Rive, who we can get into January of 2024. Biden, running out of patience with Bibi as Gaza war, it’s a hundred days. Washington Post the next month, Biden moving closer than ever to a breach with Netanyahu over a war in Gaza. CNN March of 2024, how a brief exchange and a call explains the strained Biden Netanyahu relationship associated press, Biden cajoles Netanyahu with top talk.

Ooh. Politico, March of 2024, from I love you to asshole how Joe gave up on BB after decades of building a close personal friendship with Netanyahu, Joe Biden has had it with the Israeli Prime Minister and he’s hitting him hard and it may be working spoiler. He did not hit him hard and it did not work. So there’s this alternate reality where Biden, who’s the most powerful person on earth, is somehow unable to get a country the size of New Jersey who’s 75% of their weapons company in the United States, 100% of their weapons arms reshipments come from the United States, cannot operate militarily for more than a week or two without support from the United States because obviously because of a tax in Yemen and Lebanon and elsewhere is bumbling, simply just a dottering old man who’s working really hard for a ceasefire for fucking ostensibly for nine months and he just darn it Chucks can’t get one.

And what we later learned, which I think is important is that Israeli prime minister at the time, Michael Hertzog, tells Israeli media in April of 2025 that Biden quote, “Never asked for a ceasefire not once.” He never asked for a ceasefire. And we know that because there wasn’t a ceasefire and he’s the most powerful person in the world. So there was this alternate reality that had to be painted where he was working for a ceasefire, but really what he was working for was, “Hey, Nanyahu, I’m not going to use any leverage, but would you mind?” And so the analogy I use is it’s like LA Dodgers, I know you’re an LA Dodgers fan, Dave Roberts right before the World Series saying, “I’m going to bench Shohei Otani, Mookie Betts, Freddie Freedman and all my all stars, and we’re going to put in the AAA baseball team, but I’m tirelessly working to win the World Series.” I don’t think anyone would find that to be credible.

He would be committed and people would think he’d lost his mind, but Biden repeatedly said, “I’m not going to condition military support, but I’m working for … ” That’s literally the only leverage that would do that. And everybody knew this at the time and there was precedent for it in 2021, Biden pressured Netanyahu to stop. And so it all got sort of mystified. Aaron David Miller shows up, he’s one of these Biden Hacks, one of these pro- Israel hacks who shows up and says, “Well, Biden couldn’t do it even if he wanted to. ” And then every time he shows up in the New York Times or Foreign Policy Magazine or Washington Post to kind of give this pat line about how Biden, because you had in parallel with fuming, you had helpless. So he was also helpless. He would always end it by saying, “But even if he could, he wouldn’t.” And you’re like, “Wait, what?

” So he doesn’t want to, because they’d say, “Oh, but he’s a hardcore supporter of Israel.” And it’s like, yeah, that’s the point. And so this was obviously crazy making for a lot of people who were reading this thing, pointing out that it didn’t make any sense and had all these contradictions and was based on the analogy I give is it’s like theater 101, the difference between a sketch and a plot is a sketch. A plot moves forward, it has beats, things change. A sketch is the same gag three or four times that you get out in under four minutes. This was a sketch.This went on for 10 months. You had these articles, literally over a hundred of these articles, you can find them. And you would think an editor worked their salt after the 70th fuming Biden story would raise their hands and say, “Wait, is Biden changing any policy?” No, but he’s generally mad.

Okay. Well, how is that a story? Because these were curated by the White House. All the sources are Biden aids or phone calls they know are recorded. It’s obviously-

Maximillian Alvarez:

Biden pops can of spinach and like Shakesphist at Netanyahu.

Adam Johnson:

And that’s why they have to use these meaningless puffy language about unprecedented about to. So you have this asymptotic break that always approaches zero but mysteriously never gets to zero. And then they do what they were trying to do, which is wait it out. And this is a book about buying time and about liberal hand waving and time wasting and pseudo savvy negotiations. It was about maintaining the status quo and buying time. And the reason why you buy time as any good public relations person will tell you is because you cannot defend the actual thing that’s happening. And that was the theme that we saw over and over and over again. And mainstream media just laundered that obvious self-serving bullshit over and over and over again.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well put. And obviously the whole while you’ve got this historical rupture that is occurring in large part because of media and our relationship to media, right? The disconnect between this reality obscuring power serving, genocide enabling, like all of that is being undercut by the innocence destroying images that we’ve all been bombarded with on our phones, not just the younger generation, but yeah, of course a lot more in the younger generation, which is why right now TikTok fucking sucks. You know why? Because in 24, Biden and the Democrats answer to like, what are we going to do about the public turning on us about because we’re selling a genocide that they’re not buying, we’re going to take over the fucking platform that they’re seeing it on.

Adam Johnson:

Well, they forced to sell to the Ellison family who are the single biggest donors of the IDF.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Which is, there you go. So that’s what we got. Thank Biden for that too. But I wanted to kind of ask a question here, Adam, about the why. There are a lot of potential whys here, right? But it’s obviously something we all need to be empowered with to talk with clarity but nuance about because as all of this is unfolding, regular people who are trying to make sense of the horrific reality that they’re seeing and the lies that they’re being told or the obscuring that’s being done in front of them, if they’re not getting the answers that they’re looking for, a lot of horrible ideas and conspiracies fester. A lot of hatreds and prejudices emerge. It is no coincidence that there has been rises in antisemitism while this is all happening because people are being told if you are opposed to this, you’re against all Jews.

And so a lot of people are saying, “Well, I’m opposed to that. ” So I don’t know what to tell you, but I don’t want to see a child be cut in half, blown to bits, crying over- That’s obviously because

Adam Johnson:

You’re a racist.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yeah. So the point being is that amidst all of that crap, there are very real truths here about CNN’s like Jerusalem Bureau, everything basically being reviewed and rubber stamped by the IDF. But that itself is not the whole of the explanation, right? It’s not just a sort of like Israel is telling all these newsrooms what to do, but I wanted to ask if you could sort of help us navigate the why this is being done and where it’s coming from. I’ll put it

Adam Johnson:

In these terms. And this is where I think a dialectical criticism is useful because the book is not called How to Sell Genocide because I’m trying to be provocative. It is a genocide was decided in Washington and in Tel Aviv and in the halls of power and then liberals are fundamentally a broker between the ruling class and the plebs, right? They come in and say, “Don’t worry, I’m going to take care of it. I’m going to sell what you got and meanwhile I’m going to tell them I’m going to sell them what you got.” So this is fundamentally about a decision was made, then it had to be sold and it’s an unseemly business, but once that decision’s made, what other option is there? You think they’re going to criticize, I mean, you think they’re going to criticize the genocide? You think they’re going to suddenly start putting their support behind Palestine?

No. So everyone, again, eventually around the margins, you have some pushback, but fundamentally on a structural level, the US media, whether it’s Vietnam or Iraq, is liberal, imperialist at its core, that’s its primary function. If the New York Times didn’t help sell the genocide, then there would be no New York Times. That is their social function. By definition, that’s what they exist to do. And so the decision was made and it was bipartisan and the worst place to be in the world is on the business end of a bipartisan consensus in Washington because what is the mechanism of pushback? There isn’t one. What a bunch of crusty leftists in a bookstore somewhere, they don’t get shut. You have no power didn’t fucking matter. And though by the way, you have to vote for us anyway because something, something Trump, right? And they knew that and this is under … Which I understand is that the engine that drives this is elite immunity.

When Barack Obama says, “We’re not going to prosecute torture under Bush. We have to move forward, look forward, not backwards.” When we, again, prosecute nobody for Vietnam except for some half-ass reforms, that’s a cycle of elite immunity. And every decision that was made by Tony Blinken and John Feiner in the fateful days in October and November of 2023, they knew they could just bypass it. No future administration’s going to hold them accountable. Certainly Republicans aren’t going to hold Cabo because they agree. And so they were banking on that. They were banking on Israel committing a very two, three month mass expulsion, genocide, getting their recompense and then vibing past it to the presidential election and extorting people with the specter of Trump, albeit a real specter, but nevertheless, that was part of the plan. So there’s a cycle of elite immunity that makes it so, who’s going to hold these people accountable?

Again, Tony Blinken has the most cushy job right now in liberal politics and he knew that was going to happen. So what’s the pressure, what’s the mechanism to actually push back on this from their perspective? Well, the primary fulcrum of rebellion was college campuses, which is why you had to have this campus anti-Semitism narrative, which was a complete fiction, a complete concoction of these Zionist crime bully groups like the ADL, because that was the one space where there was genuine momentum to create both the spectacle and energy and moral narratives to push back against the genocide, which is why you saw, again, I dedicated an entire chapter to it. I think it’s chapter eight, why you saw these high profile kangaroo trials in Congress where they would bring the president of Harvard and Princeton up. There’s a really clever thing the ADL does where they create what I call meta scandals where it’s all smoke and no fire, kind of like a version what they did to Jeremy Corbin.

They would ask the president of Harvard and Princeton and Yale, they would say, “Do you condemn the term globalize the Intifada?” And they would say, “Well, no, because that just means struggle and it’s a little more complex than that. ” Obviously we would not allow speech that intimidated any group of people, but we don’t condemn that phrase. And then literally the headline the Washington Post is university presidents refuse to condemn calls for genocide of Jewish students. And the average person reads that and says there were calls on campus to genocide Jewish students. There of course was no calls. We had our fact checker look for weeks. There was no such call. It did not exist. It never happened. But the way you do it is you gen up these false scandals and everyone runs for the fucking hills. And this is, if you can check out Steve Thrasher’s book, this is all explained in his book, the overseer class, which came out last week.

I just did an event with him in Chicago and he was kicked out of his teaching job, his 10-year trek job at Northwestern and he now is looking for work and has to freelance because he tried to protect his students on the campus of Northwestern and was beaten by a cop and made a villain by Republicans in Congress and later sold out by all of his supposed friends, several of whom are anti-apartheid scholars and James Baldwin scholars. Excellent book, please read it. And we can talk about the crisis of liberalism because Gaza exposed the vacuousness and uselessness of liberal and liberal institutions. But I’m sorry, I digress. I was talking about the weaponization of the antisemitism charge and how effective it was, but that’s discussed in detail and you can look at the data of … I’m going to mind if I read some data here to sort of cement this a little bit and- Read some data maybe.

Making these claims.

Yeah, here it is. So the mentions of antisemitism versus Islamophobia. So after the antisemitism scandals, which there were dozens on all these campuses, these universities and state legislators would force studies to document this. So even taking the ADLs juiced up stats, which literally say free Palestine is a basically a hate crime, even if you accept that, they were always roughly comparable to episodes of Islamophobia. Yet this was not reflected in the media. So the New York Times made reference to antisemitism on college campuses in our hundred day survey period 412 times and made mention of Islamophobia in and of itself five times and 31 they would mention both. There was sometimes it was like liberal box checking. These are all liberal box joking. Washington Post mentioned antisemitism 197 times and Islamophobia or anti-Arab hatred one time AP News 154 versus four, Politico 370 versus three for a grand total of 1,865 mentions to about 32 mentions of Islamophobia.

So the narrative was entirely one way and I’ll give you another example of this asymmetry and this double standard. I’ll give you one example in Chicago. So DePaul University, there was two students who were active members of the IDF who were on the corner every day doing this like debate me thing, I’m going to defend Israel, defend the idea. They have big Israeli flag and they were there every day. Again, after human rights watch and the International Court of Justice and Amnesty International all confirmed and found that Israel was committing genocide. So they were supporting a genocide, right? Some guy takes it into his own hands and punches him in the face. And what’s the headline the next day in local media? Jewish student attacked an anti-Semitic hate crime. Now it’s possible as an anti-Semitic hate crime, but that would be the worst coincidence ever because the guy was actively engaging in active, visible, pro- Israel activity, but then what the story becomes is about ethnic hatred.

Meanwhile, you had two major incidences, one at UCLA where these pro- Israel vigilantes came in with clubs and beat people, pro- Palestine and Palestinian protestors on campus again, attacked them with wrenches causing severe injury. And then you had the chemical attacks in Columbia in late 2023. Now, no one ever referred to that as anti-Muslim or anti-Arab racism. So any attacks or counter protests of pro- Israel students was always framed in the mobius sectarian terms whereas any attack on Palestinians was purely put in secular ideological terms and that double standard is quantifiable. You can show it and there’s no reason why that should be the case. There’s no legitimate editorial reason why there should be that asymmetry. And this book is about pointing out and quantifying and showing those asymmetries and then going up to editors and saying, “Why did you do this? ” Because we went to the New York Times and said, “Why do you use the word slaughter for the killing of Israelis 140 times, but you never use it for the killing of Palestinians?

How is it that Israel killed 20,000 children?” Again, the numbers probably double that, but they killed 20,000 children and somehow managed to never commit a slaughter or a massacre not once. Doesn’t that feel statistically unlikely? And they say, “Oh, it’s different.” Well, why is it different? It just is. But why? Because it has to be, because my entire ideology falls apart if it’s not. So that’s why they create these ontological nonsensical concepts like terrorism. There’s those sort of buzzwords because they’re meant to shut your brain off and to not do critical thinking. And so that asymmetry is, again, extremely quantifiable beyond a reasonable doubt and our numbers are conservative. We didn’t even include opinion columns. That’s how conservative we were. So if you include opinion columns, it’s probably 100% worse. And so that was what people were up against and there was very sophisticated turnkey mechanisms to use basically liberalism against itself.

So anti-hate rules on campus or Title IX or other federal legislation against discrimination was turnkey used against Palestinians, pro- Palestine protestors because to stand up for Palestine was per se, somehow a form of racism. This is why groups like the ADL have ingratiated themselves into anti-racist spaces for so long because they need to use that to defend the left blank of Zionism and Israel, which they’ve done to tremendous effect.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, we could be talking about this for two more hours and I would love to, but I wanted to just sort of talk about accountability and what that looks like and what this book empowers us to do to get it. Because I think we must acknowledge that for three plus years we tried. Not everyone can say that. I imagine if you’re all here, you did. I know and can quantify how much we tried at the real news hundreds of interviews or documentary reports or like original work on the genocide in Gaza Adam column after column interviewed like podcasts, like we post, do what people in Gaza have been asking us to do. Just like, please get our stories out there. Please don’t let people forget about us. Please do something to stop this. And for the rest of our lives, we’re all going to have to be haunted with the reality that we didn’t.

Adam Johnson:

Yeah. Well, one thing is for Israel and the US we’re banking on is that people would grow numb to it. And I think that to some extent that was a correct assumption

Maximillian Alvarez:

That in itself could lead to a very big discussion about why, because I actually think it goes beyond Gaza and it wasn’t lost on me as I was reporting from East Palestine, Ohio around the same time the train in that Ohio town derailed in 2023. And when I was there trying to get their stories up, I noticed that the algorithms they saw the name, a lot of the stories aren’t getting out there. So I’m trying to explain to these Trump voting white working class people who have been poisoned why the internet is suppressing their stories. And so there’s a lot here and again, our goal is not to explain everything in Adam’s book. You got to go read the book and I promise you won’t be disappointed. You’ll be infuriated, but you’ll be empowered by it. But again, the fact is that from algorithmic suppression and platform specific suppression and all these goddamn Trump loving oligarchs owning the media platforms as well as gobbling up the media companies and whether from CBS to HBO to TikTok.

So we got a lot on our plate here and a lot to deal with, but I wanted to ask Adam like, what accountability looks like here because we name names we have thanks to you in this book and everyone who contributed to it, the ammunition that we need to hold people accountable. But I guess I wanted to ask how we do that.

Adam Johnson:

Yeah, because I think that’s obviously the next step. Again, I’m working on projects with that. I know other people are as well. I will say that the writers against the war in Gaza has organized the boycott against the New York Times that I think we should wholly support. It’s been signed by 300 pro- Palestine and Palestinian writers and academics. It’s a subscription and a writing boycott. I know it may seem a little like boycotts can feel a little maybe not that impactful, but I think at the very least that’s a good place to start delegitimizing the New York Times as an institution because I think there’s this idea that you can reform and I think an institution like New York Times is fundamentally unreformable. So seeking to delegitimize it, not like again, indulging it, not when someone gets a job or places an op-ed, you go, “Ooh, you in New York Times.” I think that mentality that we’re going to change it from the inside with an institution like that has to be gone.

So I would check out the writers against the war in Gaza and their boycott on New York Times. Actually going to do an interview with them on Tuesday talking about it because it is like a very, very, very first step. It’s obviously not like in and of itself that, but I think delegitimizing the institutions like the New York Times who, again, we can talk about their interventions where they, I believe, crossed the line into outright genocide, whether it was accusing Honorah, which does the aid and provides food and shelter of being Hamas by laundering bogus Israeli intelligence that fell apart in two weeks, whether it was again, promoting atrocity propaganda, whether it was doing the Al-Shifa hospital command and control center that looked like a bun villain layer and then they got there, nothing was there. The Washington Post debunked it. The New York Times kept trying to put lipstick on the pig for months.

But then this outright genocide denial on healthcare workers, they repeatedly militarized schools, places where people were sheltering children. Everything was a Hamas bunker or … So that would be the first step in my opinion. Secondly would be maybe doesn’t work towards accountability, but again, reach out to your local BDS coordinator, reach out to people who are attempting to delegitimize these institutions that seek their destruction and genocide and it starts there. But unfortunately we just need to be armed with the data and be armed with the critical analysis and seek to, within our own spaces, to push back on those narratives and to delegitimize platforms like the New York Times, who I thought who are uniquely high leverage and uniquely pernicious in selling this genocide.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Let’s give it up for Adam Johnson, everyone. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Real News Network Podcast and thank you to the great Adam Johnson for this incredible discussion. Again, Adam’s new book is called How to Sell a Genocide: The Media’s Complicity in the Destruction of Gaza and it’s out now with Pluto Press, so go get yourself a copy and thank you to Red Emma’s Cooperative Bookstore and Coffeehouse for organizing this really great event. If you want to get more coverage and hear more important conversations just like this, then we need you to become a supporter of The Real News Now. Share this podcast with people in your circles, your friends, your family, and your coworkers. Sign up for the Real News Newsletter so you never miss a story and go to the realnews.com/donate and become a supporter today. I promise you guys, it really does make a difference.

For the Real News Network, this Maximillian Alvarez signing off from Baltimore. Take care of yourselves and take care of each other.

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated as soon as possible.

Michael Fox: Hi Mark.

Marc Steiner: Hey Mike, how you doing? Good to see you.

Michael Fox: Good to see you.

Marc Steiner: What do you got for us today?

Michael Fox: All right. So late last fall I visited this place that I think you’ll appreciate for this episode. Sprout Plaza at the University of California campus.

Marc Steiner: I know exactly where you were.

Michael Fox: So it’s a beautiful blue sky out. Leaves are changing colors. It’s a crisp autumn afternoon and in front of me is this big long stoic building marble, four big long Roman columns at the top of a row of stairs. This is the administration building here at the University of California Berkeley and this is called Sproul Hall. And that is important because this was literally ground zero for the free speech movement of 1964 here at the University of California Berkeley. Like the Plaza where I’m at right now, which is Sprout Plaza, was where you just had daily marches, protests, speeches just constantly happening.

I think it is really poignant that on the ground in front of Sprout Hall, someone has written in chalk, Trump must go now, refuse fascism. And it’s chalked up in two different locations here. People still staking out their territory, demanding their right to speak their voice. I was there to get a sense of the feeling being there and kind of the legacy today. And of course this was ground zero for the free speech movement. And Mark, that’s something you know a couple things about.

Marc Steiner: A little.

Michael Fox: So just to kick this off, how would you define the free speech movement for those that don’t know or don’t remember?

Marc Steiner: Well, I think you got to take a step back with the free speech movement, Mario Savio and the rest because they came out of the civil rights movement. That’s the roots of this. The roots of this is in Mississippi and Alabama and Louisiana and SNCC, the student unviolent coordinating committee and people putting their lives on the line to end segregation in the south and to register people to vote. So those are the roots of the people who created the free speech movement. And people came out of that movement in the south with black and white in different parts of the country and created things that were spawned by their work in the south
As with Mary Osavio was as well, who was a philosophy graduate student at Berkeley. And so that was also all throughout the country at that moment on the campus as I was and on the East Coast and around the country universities were clamping down on the ability for students and faculty to speak out against the war in Vietnam, which was just beginning and to talk about civil rights and racism and more. And so the locus of that, the central part of that erupted on Berkeley’s campus with a free speech movement that kind of gave birth to free speech movements across the country. So it was the beginning of the volatile 60s given birth by the civil rights movement.

Michael Fox: I was trying to make this connection to the past, right? What does it mean for people there today?

Yaseli Mendez: Yeah, I mean it’s very impactful.

Michael Fox: And so I spoke with this one student, Yaseli Mendez. She grew up in Mexico. She’s a third year psychology student. It is scary at

David Hollinger: Times.

Michael Fox: I asked her, what does it mean to be studying here and to be on this campus in this place that was so important for free speech and for this movement around the country?

Yaseli Mendez: So crazy. I was raised in Mexico and free speech is not very tolerated there. There’s a lot of violence against speaking out. And so being in a country specifically Berkeley where it’s like, wow, free speech was born, I feel very lucky to be here. Yeah.

David Hollinger: That’s awesome.

Michael Fox: I spoke with another really interesting student.

Gabriel Alou: Gabriel Alou, L-O-U.

Michael Fox: He’s a senior history student and he told me how history is still so important. Clearly he’s a history student, but not just for the free speech movement, but he made this connection to what free speech means, but also the history of struggle in the United States.

Gabriel Alou: We talk about woman suffrage movement. We talk about Malcolm X. We talk about Martin Luther King about the black rights. And also we talk about the fundamental human rights. I feel like everybody has the right to like freedom of speech. Everybody could express their ideas and thoughts. I feel like-

Michael Fox: And he said, “We still need freedom of speech. We still need a free speech movement.” It’s something that he still appreciates today. And he said something that I thought was really interesting in that everybody should be able to have their own political opinions.

Gabriel Alou: Give opinion, but you do not need to raise it to a level of conflict. Our speeches should not be something that’s division or more of a unity. Yeah, because United States is a country of immigrants. Yeah. So the main goal of free speech is for us to have different opinions from different countries. We’re coming together to make the country better but not worse.

Michael Fox: But his analysis I thought was really, really powerful and so important because he’s talking about we should be coming together, we should be focusing on the positive. And I think that’s such a great segue for this episode, Mark, because a lot of what we’re going to be doing today is talking about the powerful and the positive stories of the past and how movements have stood up and lifted up the voice and shared their voices and lifted up and stood for free speech going back hundreds of years.

Marc Steiner: I think one of the things people have to recognize though is that the battle for free speech and the belief in freedom of speech has been at the core of the fundamental debates on what democracy should be in this country from the beginning,
Whether it was the differences between Adams and others in the founding father, if they call the founding fathers or whether it’s going down to Trump wanting to arrest people and filing all these ridiculous lawsuits to stop people from speaking or this tradition act of 1798 all throughout American history, this has been a battle. And I think that there’s precedence for limiting speech and there’s precedence for expanding speech in the history of this country. And I think we are now at the precipice in the beginning, not in the beginning, I think we’re in the middle of the start of a major battle over free speech in America and this time being pushed to limit it by the right wing in America and unless they’re criticizing you because you’re black or you’re left.
And I think that that’s why this discussion is so timely and important because we’re in the throes of a battle to protect freedom and speech in this country and it’s flying under the radar for most people. It’s not being seen at all. I want to welcome everybody to a special podcast series that I’m co-hosting with my colleague and dear friend, journalist Michael Fox, about one of the core freedoms of our nation, our freedom of speech. The right to speak one’s mind is a cornerstone of our democratic principles. That precious freedom is under assault, under threat and this series is the battle for free speech, a new multi-part narrative podcast series brought to you by the real news with your hosts. I’m Mark Steiner And

Michael Fox: I’m Michael Fox. Over the coming weeks, we’ll be taking you on a journey to understand the important role that free speech has played in US history and the fight being waged over it today.

Marc Steiner: And in our last episode, we looked at the attacks by this administration of President Donald Trump on our free speech. People are being silenced, fired, even jailed for voicing their opinions and their views. This is a threat. Today, our country faces the greatest threat of free speech in decades and in this series, we’ll cover the battles being waged over free speech here in the United States, at home, and abroad.

Michael Fox: In today’s episode, we’re diving into the past to look at how the fight for free speech has been at the core of organizing and struggle for change in the United States. From

Marc Steiner: The abolitionist movement to end slavery and the civil rights to end segregation to the free speech movement of the 1960s.

Michael Fox: So Mark, I’ll be honest, I’m particularly excited to have this conversation with you today because you actually lived some of these moments actively. For those who don’t know your work or history, can you just give us a quick sense of who you are?

Marc Steiner: I’m old. No. So I started my activism when I was like 13, 14, 1960, when I was first in the civil rights movement here in Maryland, in Cambridge, Mississippi in the South with Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committe. And in 65 when I went to college, I was part of Students for Democratic Society leading the chapter at College Park in Maryland and we were taking the message from and the struggle from the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and bringing it East to have that same fight in College Park at American University at Georgetown and George Washington to bring that fight to the East Coast that took place also in Columbia when the Columbia University was taken over by Mark Rudd and the free speech movement there. So this is essential to what developed the movement of the 1960s was a battle for free speech on campuses and in the civil rights movement and to end segregation.
So the roots run deep and now we’re facing it again.

Michael Fox: Yeah. I want to continue where we started at the top amid the free speech movement at Sprout Plaza at the University of California, Berkeley. I want to go back to that moment and I don’t know if you know this, but I got my start in journalism over two decades ago, just up the street from there at KPFA. It’s the Pacifica Radio Station in Berkeley. And many, many years ago they produced this pretty incredible audio documentary about the free speech movement. They were on the ground recording and I just want to play a clip or two for you really quick right now. Yeah,

Marc Steiner: Of course. Please do. Yeah.

Recording: If you have the strength here, which you have to stand in the administration and say, “We want free speech on campus, you can have for the rest of your lives the strength to stand up whenever you say, whenever you see something you don’t like, you don’t believe in segregation or to say to the government, I don’t believe in war.” And you really have to do it
You could never believe such a thing could happen at the University of California where this many students would said they’ve had enough and they’re going to stand up right now. This university is so rough and so corrupt at its base that a simple demonstration by students asking for free speech will cause this university to collapse on outside pressure. I asked you if you can stand there and so listen my support for it.

Michael Fox: You know Mark, you and I interviewed UC Berkeley history professor David Hollinger.

Marc Steiner: Yes,

Michael Fox: Right. And he was a student at the university at the time and I asked him to take us back to that moment.

David Hollinger: Well, okay. The Sproul Plaza where Alsavio and various other worthies would be speaking And the

Speaker 3: University which is the complainant will not press charges.

David Hollinger: Now you’d have several thousand, of course proud assessments are often contested, but I can remember times when it was shoulder to shoulder all the way from Bancroft, which is the closest street to the south all the way up to say their gate, which is the part of the campus that enters the other buildings back to where the stairwell goes down to the lower level. So I don’t know, were there five or 6,000 people at those rallies? I think there might have been, but it was this feeling that we really did have this act together and there were a number of rallies like that. I would say the anti-war rallies were bigger than the free speech rallies, but they were part of the same thing. The free speech rallies began small and gradually increased over time and among the things that helped them actually, helped them grow
Were these faculty members that used to show up and speak. The issue that brought it up was the remarkably myopic perspective of the regents of the University of California and the administration, which was to prevent speech on campus that advocated political action. And so as a result, all these rallies would occur right at the edge of the campus. So you’d stand up like on the street and then you’d have a couple thousand people on the campus listening. And so the idea was this is absurd. We ought to be able to speak on the campus about political advocacy. So this is what triggered it and more and more people got involved and it’s true that the civil rights movement experience of the south was very important. There were lots of people, not only Mario Savio, but others who’d been involved in Mississippi summer so the connection was there because what kind of political adequacy did you want?
Well, we were advocating against racism.

Recording: I’m not here to destroy something. We’re all here to try to build something. Why don’t you help us?

Marc Steiner: And then that movement spread across the country. It was in Chicago. It was College Park, Maryland. It was at NYU in Columbia. It was across the United States of America that spread like wildfire, which is not often reported enough. It wasn’t just Berkeley. It took over campuses across the country and that melded into not just free speech, but free speech when it came to standing up against the Vietnam War. So all those things are really connected and there’s one piece of this people don’t talk about a lot, which is when in the student nonviolent coordinating committee in the south and SNCC, when Stokely Carmichael and some of the other leaders told the white folks who were in the Civil Rights Movement to go back to your campuses, go back home and organize and that’s part of what gave birth to all of this. And so it’s a rich history and it’s sadly relevant to this moment we’re facing today.

Michael Fox: What you brought up, Mark, what you bring up about how this spread at other universities campuses and people who were protesting elsewhere is so profound. When you saw this kind of erupt from the East Coast where you were and you saw this kind of blowing up in Berkeley, what was the context? What did you feel kind of on the other side of the country that this was happening in Northern California?

Marc Steiner: It was an inspiration I think for people across America. It was the beginnings, not the really beginning because the beginnings really weren’t with the Civil Rights Movement, but it was part of the explosion out of that movement, especially in majority white campuses across the country and white communities to stand up to the war and to stand up for free speech. And so really it was the birth of what we call the movement and the anti-war movement, all came out of this. And I remember as a young person just being enthralled by it and part of it

Recording: Is a possibility of reconciliation.

Michael Fox: You know what’s fascinating, Mark, because it seems like 60 years later people are still grappling with the same question, kind of the same struggle. Students and teachers on university campuses block from protesting or being silenced and fired over Palestine or Charlie Kirk like what we looked at in the last episode. Mark, what came out of the free speech movement? What was one and what did it mean for civil rights, the anti-war movement that would kind of explode across the country?

Marc Steiner: It gave birth to a number of things. The leading student force of the 60s, the late 60s, mid late 60s was the students for Democratic Society, SDS. And in many ways it was born out of the Port Yuran statement and Tom Hayden and all that rest, but it was born out of free speech movements.That’s what exploded the student movement across country. Part of the birth of it was a free speech movement that was deeply connected to the civil rights movement. And I think that the changes we saw in America in part came out of that time and out of that movement. It also was the reason we had this reaction today to fight back against free speech.

Recording: We have breaking news just into our newsroom this morning. Leaders at the University of Tennessee have fired a professor for her social media posts. Taken to jail, is included in a federal law. Are saying something about the deceased Charlie Kirk.

Marc Steiner: They wouldn’t say that directly on the right, but that’s what’s happening. So this is like taking America back, we’re breaking America backwards. And as a reaction to what the free speech movement gave birth to.

Michael Fox: One of the things I’ve been grappling with for this series, in particular this episode is the definition of a free speech. What does that actually mean? Today, while we’re looking back at social movement and activist organizing the free speech movement, abolitionist movement, how would you describe, what would you define free speech as taking this kind of historical look back?

Marc Steiner: We can say a lot of things about American democracy and its flaws. It’s always in a battle with itself. Freedom of speech is one of those things, one of those ideas, one of those principles that has unleashed revolutionary forces not just in America, but across the globe. The right to say what to organize and stand up, the right to say what you want to say, the right to use that to build movements. And I think that it is really at the core. Part of the essence of the early movements in the ’60s was a concept called participatory democracy that really galvanized both SNCC and SDS and other movements of people in their teens and 20s. The idea that the core of our country starts from the community, starts from the ability for everybody to say what they want and participate in this democracy as an equal.
Democracy in the beginning of this country was a democracy for white men of property, but the principles they believed in for themselves were universal. I mean, it inspired the abolition movement. It inspired the free speech movement. It inspired early union organizing in the late 19th century and early 20th century. Those principles, these white men who kept for themselves were actually universal principles.
And gave birth to all the movements who we see.

Michael Fox: Mark, let’s dive into this past. Let’s dive further into this past. Can you take us back to the 1800s to the abolitionist movement? How were people organizing demanding the end of slavery and what did free speech have to do with this?

Marc Steiner: Well, I mean, I’m not that old. I wasn’t there then, but I fantasized that I was. And so the battles that took place, especially from say 1830s to the Civil War, even earlier than that, free speech was under attack, especially when it came to the enslaved of Africans in our country. And it led to real violence. When people stood up to talk about ending slavery, they were attacked. They were killed. They were beaten. They were jailed. Thanksgiving. Free speech was dangerous to your life being a person who stood up and talked against enslavement.
And I think though that what the abolition movement did was take the words of the founding fathers of America and made them universal. Didn’t quite include women yet, but it made them universal. And I think people don’t realize that the movement to abolish slavery, the abolitionist movement in America really changed democracy forever. It was one of the major turning points. We’re still battling it in some ways, but I think that, look, I mean newspapers that came out to fight against slavery in America were burned to the ground. People were tarred and feathered. People were killed, but it gave birth to something that changed America fundamentally. And people, I think, don’t realize how deeply important the abolitionist movement was to our democracy, to our future, to our country.

Michael Fox: But even in the north, and that’s been something like researching for this podcast, Mark, which was kind of shocking to me is that you even had situations where people were in the north and they were still being attacked abolitionists in the north calling for an end of slavery all over. I interviewed this woman recently and I’ll mention her several times in today’s episode. Her name is Marianne Franks.

Mary Anne Frank…: I’m a law professor at the George Washington Law School and I’m also the president and the legislative and tech policy director of a nonprofit organization called the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative.

Michael Fox: And she talks a litle bit about this. She wrote a book in 2024 called Fearless Speech: Breaking Free from the First Amendment in which she talks about how during the abolitionist movement it was really abolitionists who were pushing the definition of free speech were rethinking of it in different ways because up until then, basically the First Amendment basically said, “Well, Congress shall pass no law prohibiting the freedom of speech.”

Mary Anne Frank…: So the assumption that everyone made based on that reading, and that’s a fair reading, is that it only applies to the federal government and it only applies in this really narrow sense that Congress literally can’t pass laws that say, “You can’t say that or you can’t say this. ” So that when you had states saying, “We don’t like this kind of activism or these kinds of expression that suggests that slavery is wrong or bad,” that was not really seen as a First Amendment issue because it wasn’t even conceptually or doctrinally possible.

Michael Fox: So that’s why you had states, for instance, that were banning abolitionist literature. There’s the great postal campaign where abolitionists send hundreds of thousands of material to Southern states, basically demanding the end of slavery, et cetera. And then states started to ban this material. They were literally prohibiting abolitionist from sending abolitionist material in the mail. But since it was the state and not Congress, then the state said, “Well, we can do this because it doesn’t fall under First Amendment.” But then abolitionists were pushing it to this other level. And so Marianne Franks talked about this one story about Elijah Lovejoy, abolitionists, Presbyterian minister, newspaper editor, journalist.

Mary Anne Frank…: He very firmly read the First Amendment as a protection of his free speech. One of the most poignant things about his story as he is continuing to move states, move cities because every time he establishes his newspaper and writes about the horrors of slavery and advocates for abolition, he’s attacked and he has to move again

Michael Fox: And so on November 7th, 1837, a mob catches up with him at his home in Alton, Illinois.

Mary Anne Frank…: And they are at his doorstep and they are saying, “You have to stop writing about slavery.” And I can’t remember the exact quotation, but he says that he has the freedom to speak in this way and he will use that freedom as he sees fit. And he says that right before the mob shoots him to death.

Michael Fox: This was the violent retribution for speaking out, but there was this new vision of what free speech should mean or what it could mean for others for change for social justice in the United States.

Marc Steiner: And I think that the newspapers that were printed at that time, like The Liberator or Freedom’s Journal were attacked violently. They were abolitionist papers, but they aren’t really at the core of what really led to freedom of the press, really led to the battle for free speech because they stood up against a horrendous violence and a horrendous nature of slavery to push the boundaries of free speech to end enslavement of African people in our country. And I think that people don’t always get that connection between free speech and the abolitionist movement. And also what you described are also the roots of the Trumpian right in the struggle that we’re facing today. What we’re facing today is like not so much of a redux as it is the growth of both moments in our country and we’re at that place. We’re head to head.

Michael Fox: Mark, I want to bring us to just the year after Elijah Lovejoy was killed Philadelphia and just to set the scene to remind people Philadelphia at the time just wasn’t just another city on the East Coast. Before 1800, it was the capital of the United States. It’s where the founders signed the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and they did that all in a place called the Pennsylvania State House or what we now call Independence Hall. It’s in downtown Philadelphia and just two blocks away in 1838, the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society built Pennsylvania Hall.

Mary Anne Frank…: Where you had all of these luminaries coming together who were staunch anti-slavery advocates and they were also advocates for women’s rights. And those are two of the most controversial positions you can take at the time, but you had all of these people wanting to come together, use their own money to build this incredible building that was supposed to become a communal hall for speaking freely and they referred to the freedom of speech in that way.

Michael Fox: And this was of course to be a place for abolitionists to come and meet and debate because at the time, like what you were talking about there, it was hard to find places to have large meetings because there was so much backlash against the abolitionist movement. So it was a big three-story building, several stores on the first floor. There was an abolitionist bookstore, another store that sold products not produced by slave labor. There were meeting rooms, a large auditorium, and it opened in May 1838, this is another one of those stories that I talked with Maryanne Franks about.

Mary Anne Frank…: And that it was going to be for the first time that the America would really speak freely. Black people and white people would mingle together, women and men would mingle together. There would be lectures, there’d be discussions, there’d be a bookstore. And it was such an incredible moment in American history that I think most people never read about because what happened when the people of Pennsylvania, and not just in Pennsylvania, there was all of these white-owned presses that were speaking about the abomination of Pennsylvania Hall in their Southern newspapers and advocating for people to go and fight for their rights against what was happening in Pennsylvania and all these flyers that were put up around Philadelphia by people who were saying that there are Obama and Nations going on at this particular hall and you should do something to stop it. And so for the first week or so when they were having their incredible lectures and there were all of this incredible progressive mingling of society, again, kind of living up to the aspirations that the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights actually articulated and people were furious about it.
The white mobs were furious about it. White businessmen were furious about it. And what happens as I recount is that they get so agitated that they burn the entire building down and they break in, they’re breaking in with stones. They start helting the building with stones as some of the speakers are speaking.

Michael Fox: And in her book, Mary Anne Franks talks about this one moment where Angelina Grimke, she was an important abolitionist and women’s rights activist. And she was literally speaking as mobs are trying to break in to stop her and she kept going.

Mary Anne Frank…: And she just incorporates it into her speech and talks about how we, she says, that we who are speaking the truth have nothing to fear. They’re the ones who should fear and tremble. But when they leave, the mob breaks in and sets and opens all the gas jets. And before you know it, this incredible monument to true free speech, expression, equality has been burned to the ground.

Michael Fox: This monument of free speech went up in smokes at the hands of white mobs and white supremacists and supporters of slavery. It’s just this crazy moment where you see this glimmer of hope of what could be, of people coming together to stand for what we dreamed the United States could actually represent literally almost 200 years ago and it’s burned to the ground within days of being built.

Marc Steiner: And what was the consequence? What happened of that act?

Michael Fox: I mean, the abolitionist movement clearly continued to organize, but there was fear around speaking out.

Mary Anne Frank…: And I think to some extent that was a very powerful kind of dampening of this moment that free speech and democracy were intertwined. I think it really did a lot to erase that from memory or put such a scar on that memory that that really wasn’t the way it was articulated for some time. And even when you saw the later abolitionist movements taking up the cause, I don’t think they so much talked about it in terms of free speeches. They just said, “This is about humanity. This is about evil. This is about a compact with the devil,” as they called the Constitution for its concessions to slavery.

Michael Fox: What’s so important is for us to remember these moments, to champion these moments, and also remember the backlash, which has been continual, but how people have continued to respond and continue to organize and would not bow down to the powers that be or the violence pushed by white supremacists, which has continued to be pushed by white supremacists in the United States.

Marc Steiner: Right. And I think that when you talk about Maryanne Franks, it’s interesting. When you mentioned her name, I remember her book, Fearless Speech. And I think that is the battle of the moment that we face in terms of fighting for free speech in America. I mean, I don’t think people realize how under threat it really is at this moment. I think that we are in a moment where as happened before in American history where freedom of speech is under attack. And I think that this notion of fearless speech is an important one to wrestle with.

Michael Fox: It is. And I want to take a second to dig in a litle bit deeper before we move on. Sure, please do. Yeah. About what this idea of fearless speech actually means. So she got this idea actually from lectures from Michel Fuku in the 1980s where he talks about the Greek concept of Paracia, which basically means saying it all. It’s freedom of speech, but speaking truth for the common good and speaking truth in a moment that it could potentially even put myself into danger. So the idea is that an ancient Greece mark, this was the most important speech that was needed to preserve democracy.

Mary Anne Frank…: It’s not just that you get to say whatever you want. The Greeks did have a word for that too, this kind of idea that you could just say things without consequences, but the Greeks didn’t seem to think that that was the particularly valuable form of speech. They thought the most valuable form of speech was the kind of speech where you had to speak in your own voice. That was the first qualification, which is you can’t pretend to be a devil’s advocate or take on a role or just do it for rhetorical purposes. You had to commit to it. And they said you also had to be speaking to or about something that was more powerful than yourself as the speaker, someone in power, some force in power and you could not be praising it because praising it is possible, of course, you can do that, but that isn’t fearless.
To be fearless about the way you speak about power is to criticize it. And it’s fearless because that creates a risk to you because once you criticize people in power, you are in danger that the people in power are going to hurt you.

Michael Fox: And so she says, “This is so important because usually kind of like in society, we kind of lump all forms of speech together.”This is in particular, we’ll talk about this in the next episode, but over social media, this is a big deal. Oh, everyone has their right to speech. But what she says is that we need to understand fearless speech juxtaposed with reckless speech. And what she describes as reckless speech is all of kind of the famous free speech cases you could imagine, KKK’s right to spread their message, Larry Flint, Neo-Nazi speech, whatever it might be, it is not fearless.

Mary Anne Frank…: These are not people who are taking a burden of speech upon themselves and actually taking a risk that they will be hurt by the people in power because they’re reinforcing power.

Michael Fox: And often people actually get hurt from their speech, but they’re not the ones who are getting hurt. So one example she gives here is the famous 1969 Supreme Court case of Clarence Brendanburg.

David Hollinger: The honorable the Chief Justice and the Associate Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States.

Mary Anne Frank…: Where he is full clan regalia doing a march around a burning cross, got the Bible at hand talking about how black people and Jews need to be removed from the country. Now that is not the kind of speech. I mean, literally someone in a mask who is proclaiming these things and stirring up dehumanization and rhetoric against people who are objectively speaking more vulnerable in society. And in the wake of those kinds of rallies, people did get lynched. They did get attacked. And the entire question of Brandenburg was how closely related do his words have to be to the attacks for it to be illegal and the answer that his words weren’t close enough. But forgetting the doctrine for a moment, that’s reckless. You are putting this out into the world fully knowing that the people that it’s going to hurt or the people that it puts in danger is not you, it’s someone else.
And there I thought that is a really important distinction that I would like to emphasize.

Michael Fox: And so what her book really emphasizes and what we see time and time again is how fearless speech is actually attacked or silenced or pushed aside or banned, whereas reckless speech is then supported again and again. But her book is interesting because she tries to kind of get away from our understanding of free speech as kind of first amendment, because there’s been a lot written. If you look at most of the books that are written about free speech today, and I have been reading many of them lately, Mark.

Marc Steiner: I’m sure you have.

Michael Fox: But if you look at most of the books that have been written about free speech, they’re all talking about, well, what’s constitutional, what’s not constitutional, what’s defended by the First Amendment, what’s not defended by the First Amendment. And what she tries to do in her book is say, “Okay, that’s all good and well, but let’s actually talk about what free speech should mean beyond the First Amendment. And how do we define this in a different way? And how do we then kind of support and champion those struggles that are standing up for fearless speech?

Marc Steiner: People kind of whittle down free speech meaning I can belittle you if I want to. It’s my right to do. ” And I think that not to go too far afield here, but I remember back in the ’80s, in my days in graduate school when I was still too old to be there, that we were wrestling with Michelle who calls fearless speech and the lectures he gave at Berkeley and how that really is at the heart of her work and at the heart of what it means to be able to stand up and fight for human rights and justice and a democratic and free world in fearless speech.

Michael Fox: Were you having conversations then about Fuko and his lectures in the 1980s? Were you all talking about that and kind of what that meant?

Marc Steiner: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. I mean, not to digress into this too deeply, but my intellectual mentor back then was a Holocaust survivor named Avram Engelman who founded Antioch here on the East Coast who actually lived in Paris and was in one of Stalin’s camps as well. So this was a major part of his being and he actually studied and worked for Co. So it was like I was one step away with my mentor, Al Engelman. Yeah, so I’m very familiar with all that.

Michael Fox: Wow, amazing, Mark. Amazing. So I want to start to move us slowly in the timeline, the chronological timeline, because there’s another important episode that happens. This is after the Civil War that I think is really important in terms of understanding this question of fearless speech, reckless speech, and how people have used free speech in the past to stand up. And so I want to go to 1890s Memphis, Tennessee.

Marc Steiner: Okay.

Michael Fox: Population, roughly 65,000 people, a third of the residents are black and there is of course incredible racism. This is Jim Crow laws are mandating segregation across the Southern United States and lynchings against black men are just so common. And just to put this into perspective, during the 1890s, someone is being lynched somewhere in the Southern US every other day.

Marc Steiner: That’s right.

Michael Fox: So it’s just a terrifying moment and one woman in particular is pushing back. Her name is Ida B. Wells.

Marc Steiner: And

Michael Fox: Again, I spoke with Mary Anne Franks about her story as well because she was a black teacher, turned journalist and really a muck rager and her focus was on denouncing the lynchings.

Mary Anne Frank…: She got really consumed by the horrors of lynching because she experienced what had happened to some people that she knew and in neighborhoods that she lived in and suddenly that became what she really felt that she needed to communicate to the public. And as you might imagine, this was not received well and it was particularly an editorial that she wrote about the horrors of lynching where she wasn’t just talking about how lynching was a bad thing. She was saying, “Here’s what I think is actually going on with the problem of lynching.” And this was something I think had not really been expressed before, certainly not by a black female journalist, but she says the story that we keep hearing about these lynchings is that the men we’re told, the black men who are usually the subject of these lynchings that they’ve done something horrible to white women, that they’re raping white women.
And she says, “Here’s what my research has shown,” because she went and she would follow on these incidents and she would gather information about them and ask questions. And she said, “What I think is happening and what seems to be happening in these places is that there’s a problem of competition.” And she says, “And it’s not just economic competition, but that’s a big part of it. It just so turns out that many of the victims of lynching are people who are black men who were running businesses that were in competition with white businesses.” But then she suggests there’s a much more intimate form of competition when she says it’s not about, in many cases, sexual violence against these white women, it was consensual relationships. And that I think is really what drove the mob around her at this time from being very angry with what she was saying to being enraged in a way that was incredibly destructive.
It was because she said, “I believe that black men are not raping white women. I believe that there are consensual relationships happening between black men and white women, and that is why lynching is actually happening. It’s a sexual vengeance project. It is why so often we see that these men are tortured in these ways that are very sexual and very physical. And it really did seem to just animate the worst possible forces where she was in Memphis to drive them to that same kind of mob rage that we saw with Pennsylvania Hall.

Michael Fox: She’s writing these stories for her paper, The Memphis Free Press, and a series of white newspapers responded with editorials advocating a violent response or calling for people to do something about it. And in the end, they burn the Memphis free press to the ground.

Mary Anne Frank…: So again, you see that same sense of all- consuming rage about the publication of this idea and you can certainly see it in the way that the white newspapers talked about her editorial. They would reprint her editorial and talk about how unbelievable it was that somebody would make such horrific accusations. And it’s so reminiscent in ways of the Pennsylvania Hall reporting after Pennsylvania Hall was burned, there were a lot of editorials in Southern newspapers where they might say something about how well it’s a shame that this incredible building was burned to the ground, but not only were these radical ideas being stated in this hall, but also white women and black men were seen leaving together and sitting together. And you could see that this was really something that was animating so much of a part of what was animating this kind of mob hatred, this real censorship was that sense of you cannot speak to that.
You cannot speak to this idea that the black races and the white races might be mingling voluntarily together.

Michael Fox: I think this is another such powerful message and reminder of regardless of the response and the violent backlash, people are standing up, people are speaking their voices, people are demanding to be heard and this is clearly fearless, fearless speech.

Marc Steiner: Now when you mentioned her, I’m just going to throw this in as well. I mean, she was one of the most amazing Americans that ever walked the face of the earth. She was fearless. I mean, in what she wrote in the movement she helped build, she helped found the NAECP. She stood up … Lynchbobs tried to kill her. They killed people around her and lynched them, but she never stopped. I mean, this is a woman who I think most Americans don’t know but should know. She was one of the great heroes of our entire history and just fearless, a woman, a black woman in that period to stand up the way she did. So yeah, I mean, she’s one of those people, whenever hear her name, Ida B. Wells, my next line is say her name.

Michael Fox: Mark, bring us up in the decades, right? Walk us into the 1950s, into the 1960s and the civil rights movement. You participated directly. How important was free speech for the civil rights movement? What did this mean?

Marc Steiner: Two things. I mean, A, the roots of the civil rights movement people don’t really often give credit to was World War II. And Truman announced the official surrender.

Recording: This is a solemn but glorious hour.

Marc Steiner: It was Black men coming back from the war throughout the South and throughout the United States standing up saying, “We just fought for this country. We’re not going to live in segregation.” Those are the roots of the movement where black veterans of World War II. We often forget that. That led to Little Rock in 1954 to start slamming down racial segregation of schools. When I was a kid in the 1950s, Baltimore, we were all in segregated schools. And I remember the first time black kids came into our elementary school. I was in the sixth grade. And so it’s not ancient history. Well, maybe some people might think I’m ancient, but it’s not ancient history.

Michael Fox: That’s incredible. For other generations, that seems like that was lifetimes

Marc Steiner: Ago. Yeah. I mean, I was just very lucky to have been living then and have the mother that I had who stood up to racism and crossed the line early and my father, who was the first white doctor in Baltimore to integrate his waiting room and it was that recent. White doctors made black patients come in at the end of the day or early in the morning and leave. So it’s a history that has defined this country and the battle against it has defined this country, the struggle for a different world. But I think that what we’re seeing in America now is really a pushback against all of that. That’s what the Trumpian right is. It’s a decisive pushback against free speech and against civil rights and how those two worlds are intermarried. As I said before, the free speech movement in America was born of the civil rights movement.
The struggles are connected, which is why the battle against racial equality and the battle against free speech are also connected.

Michael Fox: Mark, I want to dig just a little bit deeper into this because what is it about free speech that was so important for the civil rights movement, for the anti-war movement? Is it the idea that we should be allowed to stand up and to speak for what we believe? We should be allowed to protest and to change the structure, the inherently racist structure of the country. What is it about free speech in particular that is so important to these movements at the time?

Marc Steiner: That’s a really interesting question. I mean, again, I may go back to start what I said a little while ago. When America started with free speech, it was free speech for white men of property.
That’s how it began. But it was such a universal principle that everybody embraced it and fought for the right to have free speech. And I think that’s something we forget. What the founding fathers did was unleash a democracy for themselves, but what the unleashed was a passion for democracy among everybody else and that redefined … It was a long struggle. And I think people know often make that connection. And I think that what you talked about earlier, which was the violence against those who really pushed it in the early part of the late 19th century, something most people don’t see or know the deaths that came place for fighting for free speech.
I think now we’re in that battle again. We really are. I mean, for me, it’s not a question of Republicans or Democrats. It’s a question of the anti-free speech movement, the anti-free speech movement, the racist movement, capturing one of the America’s parties and pushing this very dangerous agenda for the future. Let South be confused, the Democrats are all good and Republicans are all bad, but we have to be realistic about what’s happening to us right now. It almost seems to me to be, in terms of free speech, akin to when the right wing in Germany ceas power in 1933. And I think that we have to look at that history and understand what we’re facing.

Michael Fox: When we spoke with David Hollinger, he had this really interesting thing to say exactly about this is how Trump today is using the narrative of free speech to censor and using the narrative of free speech for his own means, attempting to derail our definition of free speech when it’s only for himself. Well,

David Hollinger: What happens is that Trump uses a lot of generic ideals like merit and free speech and diversity and he claims that he represents them and that the academic establishment has betrayed those ideals. And so free speech is somehow that’s not allowed unless it’s enunciating the stuff that he wants to advance.

Michael Fox: So free speech for my people is what Trump is saying, but if you’re not one of me, if you’re not with me, then you’re against me and you don’t deserve to have free speech. And of course, I think this is part of that same contradiction, this same push and pull that you talked at the beginning that goes, that is historic throughout the history of the United States. But I think it is fascinating today how Trump’s attempts to take the universities for himself and use this discourse around free speech, his own definition in order to support himself or bolster himself weaponizing the different departments of the country. It is clearly a terrifying moment and another reason why this moment of free speech of trying to define what this is and remember the movements that have stood up and fought for everything that’s made the United States great in our history and why it’s so important now.

Marc Steiner: People have to realize also it’s a constant struggle. It’s never over and it never will be over probably and that the movements you’ve raised here, like the abolitionist movement was so key to expanding our democracy. It was such a threat to people in power and the destruction of that movement, I always say the destruction of freedom in the South and its roots in the abolitionist movement in the 1870s gave birth to 90 years of sheer terror against the black world in America. And it was the civil rights movement that went back to the roots of America, freedom of speech for everybody to break the back of that and try to build new America. And what we’re seeing now is a reaction to that. Was it in Spanish. It’s not over. It’s never over.

Michael Fox: Mark, I have a question about the legacy of the free speech movement today and thinking about, particularly around universities and campuses, would you say that we’ve actually been rolled back some of the gains, the rights to be able to stand up and speak out at university campuses, which were one, which were so important clearly during the anti-war movement, anti-Vietnam movements, what that’s always meant up until now, but it almost feels as though all of that has been rolled back so much in terms of like the government backlash against pro- Palestine protests on campus or saying anything about Charlie Kirk clearly. Would you say that things have been rolled back to even before the time of the free speech movement in the 1960s?

Marc Steiner: I would say they are attempting to roll it back. It has been rolled back completely, but universities are running scared. They’re terrified. I mean, huge chunks of money for universities comes from the federal government and that’s what Trump is threatening them with, taking that money away. And so the university systems either have to stand up and fight it with a threat of losing their money or cowtow to it and roll over.

Michael Fox: This is interesting because this is one of the things that David Hollinger brings in. He says, “This is the hill to die on.

David Hollinger: Given what the Trump administration is trying to do to universities to reduce them to vocational and technical institutions, to deprive them of the critical role that universities have traditionally played in fomenting democracy, they really are trying to do that. So that means that this is the hill to die on. The universities are right. This is the hill to die on. This is the worst crisis that we’ve had since 1916, 17, 18, in terms of the political opposition to universities when Charles Beard resigned at Columbia and there were a whole series of quarrels over World War I. This is by far the worst thing that’s happened since then and universities are much more central to American life than they were at that time. They have a lot more authority, they affect many more things. So it’s important that we take a stand and I’m very glad to see that many of them are, but not all.

Marc Steiner: This is the tip of the iceberg because Trump and his minions on the right see attacking the university systems, not just as killing freedom of speech, which is the subtext to it, but as a first salvo in controlling their power by limiting and shutting down freedom of speech in universities. And it’s not really given enough play in the press.
When the National Socialist Party took power in 1933 with a minority of the vote, I might add, but they built a broad coalition, everything they did in the beginning was subtle. They didn’t come in one fell swoop and turn the whole place into a dictatorship overnight. They built it slowly and they created one of the most horrible societies the world has ever seen, killing 11 million people in Europe, in concentration camps. So what I’m saying that is, is that we have to be really very watchful and careful about what we’re facing. This is just the beginning. It’s not the end. And people say it can’t happen here. Well, it can happen here and it has happened here before, especially if you’re black or indigenous. And so I think we are, as I said before, we’re on a precipice and I think we cannot underestimate the moment that we face.

Michael Fox: Mark, I want to Bring in Mary Anne Franks one more time.

Marc Steiner: Please do. Yeah.

Michael Fox: And I want to talk about the First Amendment because for me, this was a really powerful … It’s a controversial point in her book, I feel like, but I think we need to discuss it and I think it’s important to grapple with because in our conversation and in her book, she talks about how racial justice advocates and social moments have succeeded in the history of the United States, have succeeded in the past despite rather than because of the First Amendment or First Amendment protections. And so she says, imagine an alternative America.

Mary Anne Frank…: Where from the beginning we took the concept of free speech in the way that Elijah Lovejoy took it, which is to say, we have to recognize if freedom of speech means anything, it is the freedom to criticize what we are doing, what the powerful people are doing in our society. And the most important thing for us to articulate at that time is slavery. And close on its heels is the subjugation of women. Imagine if that had really been allowed to sort of take … If Pennsylvania Hall had never burned down and it really did become a temple of humanity where people began to see that things that they were deeply wedded to, ideas that they had always grown up thinking were correct if they really had been challenged by other ways of thinking if that had been allowed to flourish. I mean, think about how radical and revolutionary that would’ve been.

Michael Fox: Could that and so many other experiences have actually shifted the discourse within the United States enough to stop the Civil War, she asks. Instead, you have the Clarence Brandenburg version of what it means to be radical. So KKK, Neo-Nazi, those are the guys who are embraced and protected.

Mary Anne Frank…: We skipped the part where it actually becomes the norm that slavery and all forms of racism and sexism are evil and wrong. Instead, it goes from becoming the way that society’s constructed to, “Oh, he’s saying something very edgy that’s probably making you uncomfortable, but for that reason, we should protect it. ” And it’s like there’s nothing in between. And so at that point it gets quite literally the KKK gets a second life and a third life. And it’s partly because it’s revitalized through these perversions of the concept of free speech to say, “Well, we must be allowed to say these things now that slavery has been abolished. We fixed things in terms of racial injustice and now it’s all gone too far. And so we are going to be the old guard who is going to be talking about how things used to be. ” And then immediately that’s what gets so much protection, gets so much rhetorical resources and protection.

Michael Fox: And she brings this one other moment. She talks about this, which I think is important. She talks about the white supremacist play and then movie, the 1915 movie, The Birth of a Nation, right? Yeah. So it sparks riots every place and lynchings.

Mary Anne Frank…: And you get one of the first sort of showdowns between the NAACP and the ACLU, where the NAACP is saying, “This is going to get people killed.” And the ACLU saying, “You really need to understand that if you’re trying to advocate for censorship, it’s going to hurt you too at some point.” And it’s one of those moments in the book where I’m trying to articulate the expression on my face when I read this, this idea of the NAACP being lectured by the ACLU, by the white director of the ACLU saying, “It’s going to come around and hurt black people. The law isn’t going to work for you if you advocate for restrictions now.” And the obvious point being that the law has never really worked for black people. Of course, it’s going to be used against them. It has been this entire time. That whole premise of the, well, don’t censor the radical white supremacist speech because it’s going to mean that you’ll get censored too, completely erases the fact that radical abolitionist speeches we were just talking about has always been censored, has always been suppressed.
So it’s this kind of retelling of history that is so perverse because it’s also this kind of lecturing that says, if you just had a sophisticated enough view of speech and just enough confidence in the American people, you would understand that we just need to allow this kind of material to flourish so that you will be saved as much as the white supremacist will be saved.

Michael Fox: And so I feel like this is such an important point and really powerful because she said this and it had to take a double take. The fact that social movements, abolitionist movement, the fact that the civil rights movement, the fact that they were successful not because of the First Amendment, but actually despite the First Amendment, but because of free speech, but free speech the way that we consider free speech, not free speech as according to say the Constitution and whatnot and that white supremacists have always gotten the benefit of the doubt and everyone else has gotten shut down, but people continue to stand up.

Marc Steiner: That’s interesting. It really is. It would take a lot to explore what you just said and what she said because the alternative theory is if you shut that down, then we’re next to be shut down.

Michael Fox: Exactly.

Marc Steiner: It’s really difficult. I mean, I know that battle around the ACLU and the NAACP and it’s a core battle and I understand both positions. The oppression of black people in America saying this has to be banned and stopped because it’s attacking us and formating violence against us and the ACLU saying one of the bedrock rights in America is the right to say what you want to say, even if it’s disgusting and full of hate. So it’s a difficult discussion. We could do a whole series just on that. Really? You know? I mean-

Michael Fox: Totally.

Marc Steiner: I’ve had this debate over decades around the First Amendment, what’s the First Amendment say? Congress shall make no law representing an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof or abridging the freedom of speech or of the press or the right of the people peacefully to assemble and to petition the government for a redress of grievances. That’s pretty broad. So that’s a very difficult question. I’ve been fighting racist and neofascist my whole life since I was a boy, since I was maybe 11, 12, 13 years old. And so I’m passionate about it, but it’s a really difficult nut to crack.

Michael Fox: What I come back to here is what you said at the beginning about the contradiction at the root, at the core of free speech in the United States and the conflict and the battle over what it means today, but what it’s meant and what it’s always meant and how there has always been this push and pull. I think what’s the most important thing for me now is for us to understand what is at the root of this battle and for us to be able to define it like when we talk about fearless versus reckless speech,
This is not a concept that people understand, but it’s a concept that we should understand because when we go out and speak truth to power or people are standing up in the streets, they should understand and know that they are participating in something that goes back, this idea of speaking out goes back thousands of years. It’s not just right now and that they have this support and this backing even if the First Amendment hasn’t always worked in their favor or has often supported white supremacists at the same time as it’s silenced those fighting for social justice or those fighting for equality. So I think you’re absolutely right that this is a hard, hard nut to crack, but it’s still a conversation we have

Marc Steiner: To have. We do. Because the reckless think they’re fearless.

Michael Fox: Yes.

Marc Steiner: I mean, it really is tough. It really is. So now I have to go home and think about all this.

Michael Fox: Mark, I want to close with someone else I spoke with recently.

Fara Dabhoiwala: Fara Dabhoiwala. Well, I’m a historian at Princeton, but I used to teach at Oxford University in England.

Michael Fox: His book, What Is Free Speech? The History of a Dangerous Idea was published last year. I’ll be bringing him in more in future episodes, but I really appreciate his analysis for this episode and where we’re headed. He told me free speech has always been about power.

Fara Dabhoiwala: Both in the theory and in practice, we see that today, what voices are silenced or elevated is about power. It’s a noble ideal because everyone can appeal to it and throughout history, as my book shows, those without power and those who are attempted to be silenced have also appealed to it from abolitionists and early feminists onwards into the present day. So that’s the good side of why it’s a dangerous idea. And we should all be shouting from the rooftops that right now free speech rights are being trampled upon. The First Amendment is being completely disregarded in the United States and the rest of it. But I think that the real global battle here is about how to deal with the communications revolution that we’re living through and how to deal with the power of media companies, the unfettered transnational power of basically of American media companies.

Michael Fox: And I’d say not just media companies, but tech companies, social media, AI firms, and that’s where we’re headed next time.

Marc Steiner: And next week we go to Silicon Valley. Look at the internet, social media, artificial intelligence are transforming the way we communicate and what it all means for our right to free speech.

Michael Fox: Hi folks. Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed today’s podcast and you like this series, please do us a favor, go to your podcasting app and give us a like, a follow, a subscribe, or tell a friend about it and leave us a comment or a review. It really helps to spread the word about the show and the state of free speech in the United States today. You can find more of my work on my Patreon page at patreon.com/mfox. Also, please make sure to sign up for the Real News Network’s newsletter so you never miss an episode. You can find that at therealnews.com or you can click on the link in the show notes. If you’d like to find out more about the stories we talked about today in this episode, we’ve added some links in the show notes there as well. The Battle for Free Speech is a production of The Real News.
Thanks for listening. See you next time.